


Little Brother

by Tammany



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Brotherly Love, Brothers, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Spies & Secret Agents
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-30
Updated: 2014-03-30
Packaged: 2018-01-17 13:27:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,678
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1389385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tammany/pseuds/Tammany
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is a whump BAMF!Mycroft story. The British Government has been ruthlessly brave and, perhaps, stupid in the name of his duty...and now comes the aftermath.</p><p>Sherlock's POV. An odd team backing up Mycroft, but I actually think it's plausible for the sort of highly secret project they pulled off: only his most trusted, and least obvious cohort. At least one odd connection readers may scratch their heads over, but I think it works.</p><p>Angsty and sentimental and of course all mushy over Sherlock and Mycroft and that sloppy, sweet brother thing and their respective adorable idiocies.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Little Brother

“Let me in,” Sherlock snarled, a frantic, furious deerhound ready to bay in the face of the man who stood between him and the door to his brother’s hospital room.

Lestrade’s eyes narrowed. “No.”

“You have no right.”

A shrug—then, “Maybe. Maybe not. But I do have the obligation.” After a pause for that to sink in, he added, “It’s what he wanted.”

The use of the past-tense set Sherlock off. “And what does he want now?”

Lestrade’s lips tightened. He didn’t respond.

Sherlock couldn’t add anything, though—he had no idea what Mycroft wanted right now. That was the point, and the center of the problem. After a moment he said, grimly, “How is he, Lestrade?”

Another voice answered…Irene Adler, of all people. She slipped silently out of the sick room, slim and elegant and contained, and said, “He’s scared and lost and miserable and we don’t know when that’s going to change. Or if…”

“Then let me in,” Sherlock said, again snarling. “He and I—we were all either of us had when we were little. Maybe it would help if I were in there. My voice. My face.”

Mary Watson slipped out, too—Mary in some strange mode that combined her assassin self with the trained nurse who’d worked with John for so long. She came to stand by Irene, saying, “Sherlock, that’s the whole point. Of all the people in the world he didn’t want seeing this, you were the one—the one person he wanted to spare. And to be spared.”

“So he dragged you all in, and left me and John in the dark.” Sherlock was quivering with the injustice of it. “I’m the one who rescued him, though. I’m the one who brought him back.”

“You’re the one who damned near ruined it all,” Anthea said from behind him, coming in from the rest of the secret MI6 clinic in Baskerville that lay beyond swinging double-doors. She was bristling and angry—a furious cat to Sherlock’s enraged hound. “If you’d gotten there any earlier you’d have saved him before he accomplished what he planned. He’d have gone through it all for nothing, taken the risk and paid the price only to have it wrecked by your damned interference.”

“Then maybe someone should have told me that his abduction was part of a bigger plan.” Sherlock looked to where John Watson sat on a bench at the side of the room. “At least let John in. I’d like to be sure Mycroft’s being properly treated.”

Anthea gave a scornful huff. “Do you really think we’d let Mr. Holmes receive anything less than the best we have to offer?”

“You let him go in, knowing what he’d face.” That alone seemed like sufficient proof to Sherlock. “Capture. Prolonged, repeated interrogation under the H.O.U.N.D. gas. You didn’t even have a guarantee he’d come through alive, much less manage to maintain enough control to provide the misinformation he’d planned.”

“If he’d broken, we had orders to cover it,” Lestrade said. “The entire thing. We’d go in, sweep them all up, close it all down. It would mean the loss of years of intelligence gathering, but it was worth the risk. Frankland’s people, his international handlers, think they’ve got the best intel breakthrough in twenty years…and Mycroft’s set them up to trust our own double-agents for decades to come. Do you have any idea what he’s won us?”

“Do you have any idea what he’s risked?” Sherlock paced a step closer, and then another, until he was confronting the man across Irene and Mary’s heads, ready to surge through and grapple with his friend and mentor if anyone breathed wrong, moved wrong. “I’m a chemist…not to mention the resident junkie. Yeah, that’s me—just reminding you. No one— _no one_ knows what that duration of unmonitored exposure and stress will do to him. Some of the victims suffered long-term emotional and neurological damage. He may not come out of this.”

“He took precautions,” Anthea said.

John made a small, unhappy noise and shifted uneasily on the bench. “Er—no. I’ve been looking over the paperwork on this that you gave us. He used the chemical buffers and counteragents that your people have theorized might do some good. But most of the current work on the H.O.U.N.D. compound was done by Frankland, in secret, and we’ve got no tests, no latitudinal or longitudinal studies. Mycroft _gambled._ He did what he could to improve the odds, and then he just plain gambled.”

“I brought him in,” Sherlock said, still matching his glare to Lestrade’s. “He was…” He swallowed, then. “He was broken.”

Mycroft had been broken. After three days in the hands of his captors Sherlock had brought him back silent and broken and unspeaking, eyes huge, hands shaking, too frightened to move…traumatized to near catatonia.

“Let me in,” Sherlock said again. “He’s my brother. Let me in.”

Irene sighed. “Let him in. At least he’ll see we’re taking care of Mycroft.”

Mary, Lestrade, Anthea and Irene all passed uneasy glances back and forth, playing out a silent debate. At last Anthea said, “All right. On our terms, though. You stay back. You let us do our work, and you don’t interfere.” She blinked, daring anyone to suggest she was holding back tears. “He didn’t want you to see this, Sherlock. You weren’t supposed to learn of the abduction until it was over. You weren’t ever supposed to see him this way unless it proved…”

“Permanent. Unless the damage was permanent,” Sherlock said, grim.

She nodded. “He loves you. I don’t know which mattered more: that he spare you…or that he spare himself the indignity of having you see him like this.”

“He knew what it would do to him…” There was a question embedded in Sherlock’s voice. An unnecessary question: Mycroft Holmes would not have made a move without doing his research down to the last footnote in the least of medical journals. Still, he asked.

Mary cleared her voice. “He knew. He told me to make sure you and John understood, if it did turn out to be permanent. The chance to shift the game for an entire generation—that’s what this was. Is. They think they’ve broken the premier spymaster in Europe. They think they’ve got information that we can’t ever actually change. Not just things that can be shifted in no time—codes and project names and even minor strategies. They think they’ve got all the players, all the deep motivating factors, an exact photograph of our limits and our knowledge. He was able to feed them that.”

“How,” John snapped from his place at the sidelines. “He was drugged and in pain. How?”

“Conditioning. Crazy, crazy conditioning. Even more than pure will-power. He went in and turned on an entire secondary reality, and how the hell he made it work is anyone’s guess,” Lestrade said, weary. “He worked with our psych teams for months previous. The minute he let them take him, he shifted his mind to…what is it you call your mental thingummy? Your ‘Mind Palace’? He’d built a second palace—a palace made of lies woven in and out of truth. And when they questioned him, even when he broke, he broke _inside_ _that fantasy_.”

“You’re sure?” Sherlock shivered. “You’re sure it worked?”

“We’re sure,” Irene said, calmly. “Believe me, we’re sure.” She took his wrist, and looked at Lestrade. “Come on, big boy. Let’s let baby brother in.” She turned to Sherlock. “You keep your promise. Stay out. Let us work with him. Don’t interfere without permission. You’ve come close enough to ruining everything already.”

Sherlock sighed and nodded.

Lestrade opened the door, and they all slipped in.

It was a large room arranged to seem small and intimate. Screens blocked off a cozy, protected space lit by warm, dim light, with only shadows and tiny area lights picking out the various observation stations and machines half-hidden around the margins of the larger room. Mycroft, curled sleeping in the hospital bed, would see nothing but safe curtains and comfortable limits to the space around him, all bathed in golden light fitting for a nursery or the intimate confines of a sitting room at night.

Lestrade and Anthea slipped into the shadows, finding seats where they could observe without being easily seen. Mary and Irene moved forward, Mary to check charts and adjust various sensor wires and IV tubes; Irene to sit at Mycroft’s head. The Woman’s hand slipped into Mycroft’s; her other hand stroked his brow. He murmured in his sleep and turned his face in toward the caress.

Sherlock frowned. “What….?”

Irene heard him. Without looking away from Mycroft, she said, “He hired me, Baby Brother. When he could have thrown me out in the world as a defeated enemy, he hired me…and…he understood.” She did turn, then, eyes seeking him in the shadows, trying to look past the light-blindness into the dark to find him. He wasn’t sure whether she did—or whether she was able to fake it, applying her brilliant mind to the illusion of sight. “You know what I mean, Sherlock. He _understands_. I wasn’t alone, after that.”

Sherlock scowled—but he did understand. Two brilliant, solitary minds; two gay geniuses, swimming solitary, dolphins in a world of goldfish. Two lonely, sophisticated geniuses, desperate to show off to an audience clever enough to justify feeling special. Both gaming the world, both struggling in solitary isolation. Sherlock had understood Mycroft hiring the former dominatrix after the Bond Air fiasco and Sherlock’s breaking of her phone code. It wasn’t like Mycroft to waste that kind of talent, and Irene Adler had been in no position to turn down a generous offer from the British Government. What had not occurred to him, even after being brought into play to rescue her from the catastrophe at Islamabad, was that she and Mycroft were…

“Friends,” he said. “You’re friends.”

She raised one elegant shoulder, dismissively. “He hired me,” she said again, as though in saying only that she could draw a veil of modesty over the story told by her hand wrapped around Mycroft’s; her other hand stroking his head.

Not a goldfish—a peer in every sense…

Sherlock felt a twinge, and wasn’t even sure who he was jealous over—Irene or Mycroft. Or perhaps both.

Mary moved around the bed, and handed a plastic basin with a damp facecloth to Irene. “Been crying again,” she said. Irene nodded and slipped her hands free, taking the basin and setting it on the bedside table. She leaned over and cradled Mycroft’s head in one hand, wiping his face with the other.

“Was he always so quiet as a boy?” she asked, as she washed away the salt track of the tears. “He’s scared, but he doesn’t make a sound. He cries silently. Even dreaming he doesn’t whimper, just pants his fear like an animal that’s run too far, too long.”

“He grumbled,” Sherlock said. “Snapped. Fussed.” He sighed. “If he cried or was afraid, though, I never knew.”

“So, yes. He was that quiet,” Irene said.

“How am I supposed to know, if he hides it?” Sherlock growled…and growling knew he was angry for decades of not-knowing. For private secrecy and for professional secrecy and for being expected to know feelings were there when they were hidden like wild nighttime animals in the wild nighttime woods. “How am I supposed to know?”

“Deduce it?” Irene said, dryly…then sighed. “Maybe just realize that he’s shouting if he behaves like you whispering. You’re not the same, Sherlock. Similar. Not the same.”

“Oh, that’s a help,” Sherlock snapped, temper fraying.

Mycroft’s eyes opened. “Sherlock?”

“Shhhh,” Irene said, gently. “It’s all right. Sleep now, tiger.”

Mycroft’s brow furrowed. “Sherlock…where?” He struggled to sit. It was painful to watch, Sherlock thought—too obvious with every motion that while the gentle, worried boy remained, the fierce mind and driving will that had been housed in Mycroft’s body had gone astray. He moved with the lack of body-awareness of the dementia patient and the blind man. “Where’s Sherlock?”

Anthea gave a grumbling growl. “Let’s get him out of here….He’s just going to upset him.”

“No," Lestrade said, warily. “I think…let him go to him.”

Irene frowned and considered, then nodded, adding to Lestrade’s request. “Yes. Let him try.”

Anthea fretted. “He didn’t want…”

“One more person to call him home,” Mary said, setting a hip at the edge of the bed, below the steel railing containing Mycroft like a baby in a cot. “It’s in our hands, now, not his. Our judgement.” She glanced into the shadows. “John? What do you think? You’re the doctor…and probably our best expert on trauma. God knows you’ve suffered enough of your own. Which is better? Sherlock to hang on to, or not?”

John rumbled as he thought, then said, firmly, “Better to have him than lose him, I’d say.”

Sherlock huffed a quiet “That’s what I’ve been saying all along,” but he didn’t make a major thing of it. Instead he straightened as Mary let down the railing on her side of the bed. When she nodded to him, he walked cautiously into the warm circle of golden light.

Mycroft’s face turned toward him—and lit. He smiled in a way Sherlock was sure he’d never seen. Perhaps his parents, once, when Mycroft was very young, had seen a smile so unguarded, so unreserved. Sherlock was sure he never had. By the time he’d been born Mycroft was seven, and almost certainly already “the quiet one” by then—enigma wrapped in mystery. Silence and shadow and secrets: nothing like the sunshine glow of love and delight. “Sherlock!”

Sherlock gulped and nodded. “I’m here, Mike…” Too late he realized his voice had betrayed him. He sat, then, on the bedside. “Are you all right, Mike?”

Mycroft’s golden smile faded, then, and a worried, haunted look took its place. He drew in on himself. “Don’t know. Can’t remember.”

Irene coiled in her chair, a cobra ready to strike in defense of her friend. Sherlock could feel Mycroft’s chosen cohort stir in readiness.

He put his hand in Mycroft’s, remembering all the times Mycroft—to his annoyance—had slipped his hand into Sherlock’s: crossing roadways, creeping across slick, algae-covered rocks in the stream near Mummy and Father’s home, tip-toeing along the top of a high stone wall when preparing to go scrumping apples—or, as Sherlock had loved to think of it, “making a pirate raid on the orchard.” Carefully, gingerly, he pulled Mycroft close, and wrapped his arms around his suddenly small, young brother…the brother who needed someone to watch out for him. “It’s all right, Mike. It’s all right…”

Mycroft, the quiet one, stiffened in his arms, then shyly relaxed, letting his arms circle Sherlock—his face hide in Sherlock’s shoulder. “Oh,” he said, softly, as though amazed.

He probably was amazed, Sherlock thought, angrily. Forty-three years, and how often had the damned fool given himself what he had given Sherlock so often—the right to cling and hang on? Life would have been so different between the two if Mycroft had taken this, as well as giving it so constantly.

He stroked his brother’s head. “It’s all right, you silly idiot. I’m here.”

“Not the idiot,” Mycroft murmured, fretfully. “Smart one.”

Sherlock snorted, but didn’t argue. Instead he prayed that the fierce raptor mind would return; that Mycroft’s will—all steel and power and aim—would come back. That the exposure to the H.O.U.N.D. toxins had been limited enough, and the trauma sufficiently well prepared for to allow his big brother to come back. And he prayed that if Mycroft did return, he’d forgive Sherlock this moment of holding his strange little brother in his arms to comfort him until the big brother came home to take care of them all again.


End file.
